Saturday, December 29, 2007

Add-in to merge letters to separate files

I was working on a project for a non-profit organization this weekend, and I ran into an issue that caused some head-scratching. The group needed a large mass mailing, and the process of getting the data into an XL-sheet and running a Mail merge using Word seemed easy enough. It was, except for the fact that Word creates one big document as a result (even though you get that by selecting the somewhat misleading "Edit individual documents").We needed a separate Word document for each record of the Mass Mailing and Word can not do that.After searching for some time, I was ready to write a macro myself, but luckily I found Graham Mayor's website with a nice Add-in that solves the problem. The add-in will intercept the command to merge to a new document and provides an additional option to merge to separate document files:Graham's website contains a ton of other Word Tips. I haven't checked them out yet, but it definitely looks worthwhile.